It's raining pretty hard all week, especially today. This is never good for the air conditioning (it's more efficient on dryer days). Strangely the beeper went off while Jeff and I were here in the lab - and the only reason it goes off is if computers in the closet are well beyond some high temperature threshold. Well, actually there's another reason it would go off: somebody misdialing and calling the beeper number. Turns out the latter was the case. Ha! Still, temperatures are slightly higher today in the closet. Keeping an eye on that.

Projects continue along, like the decommissioning of ptolemy. This was a multi-purpose, heavily used internal file server, so I've been lost in a lot of rsync'ing, cleaning up stale symbolic links and hard paths in scripts/crontabs, etc. However annoying it's a good opportunity to do some filesystem spring cleaning. However thorough I'm being I'm still bracing for unexpected things to break when we cut over (next week some time?).

Speaking of next week, Monday is a holiday (President's Day) so don't expect much activity from us. However, by Tuesday's normal weekly outage we hope to have all the workunits copied back to gowron from thumper so we can revert to our original state and regain a little more normalcy.

We did shut down the assimilators/splitters for a while today to do some database read/cache settings during quiet states to remove all variables and confirm our understanding how informix is caching results/indexes/etc. The good news is we seem to understand the plumbing. The bad news is we still aren't where we want to be i/o-wise. Still working on it.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

If you are having temperature troubles in the server room when it rains outside, have you guys looked at getting a dehumidifier.

Let me explain:

Air Conditioners cool the air by removing the moisture from it. Thus, on rainy days there is more in the air (hence A/C cannot remove moisture fast enough to cool properly).

My thought here is to get a dehumidifier and run it when it rains out. This will greatly help the A/C work alot more effectivly.

Depending on the size of the room and how quickly you want the excess moisture removed, depends on the price of a dehumidifier. There are some nice units available that are on wheels and can be rolled into a storage closet out of the way when not in use (about the size of a large suitcase).

Air Conditioners cool the air by removing the moisture from it.
Thus, on rainy days there is more in the air (hence A/C cannot remove
moisture fast enough to cool properly).

err.. air conditioners work by removing *heat* from the air. Moist air
has a higher specific heat capacity, thus requires more energy.
Dehumidification is a byproduct as the cooled air can't hold as much
water vapour and it condenses out. This releases latent heat which
also requires energy to remove.

Getting a dehumidifier is almost the same as adding more air conditioning,
unless you use a few buckets of silica gel.

If it's raining outside, the temperature outside is usually lower and
should therefore make the a/c more efficient as the refrigerent can
give up its heat more effectively as it condenses back to its liquid
phase.
I'm not sure that the difference in efficiency amounts to more than a
couple of percent.

the air in the 'closet' should be dry with the AC constantly running, as long as they keep the door shut. if you duct the hot air from behind the racks to the AC return duct you will dramatically improve efficiency! it is easier to remove heat from hot air.

the air in the 'closet' should be dry with the AC constantly running, as
long as they keep the door shut. if you duct the hot air from behind the racks
to the AC return duct you will dramatically improve efficiency! it is easier to
remove heat from hot air.

If the room is sealed then humidity won't be a problem, but it would be far better
to unload and bypass the AC and duct the air straight outside, or to where it may
be useful elsewhere on campus, for example helping to heat a swimming pool or go
into a heat sink that can be drawn upon in winter.
Continuous 10kW+ plus AC costs is not a small amount of energy to just throw away.

Hi Matt. Just wanted to tell you that everything is running GREAT ! I'm having no problems getting work, and no problems sending the completed work back to the project. GOOD WORK on fixing all the problems, and THANK YOU !!

As to the air conditioning problems, just pipe the heat into my house ! I'm geting one HECK of a snow storm at the moment, and a little extra heat would be nice !!

Wait wait wait......you made a post that doesn't contain "failure" and people getting worried.....something is wrong in the lab, quick dial the beeper number I think someone needs to check on Matt! STAT!

(I'm glad you can post 'mundane' news for a change)Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!